ObamaCare: The Other Socialist Connection (Meet Marilyn Katz)

John Perazzo has another chapter in the ever-growing list of Obama Communist associations and influences at FrontPage Magazine. “The Communists Behind Obama’s Health Care Goals,” which draws on the research of Trevor Loudon, traces the influence of Dr. Quentin Young, a former Young Communist League who went on to join the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — and who attended the first Obama fundraiser at Bill Ayers’s house. Young claims his organization, Physicians for a National Health Program, convinced Obama to support a single payer health care plan — the goal to which the present bill is the first step.

There is a connection the article misses, though, one even closer to Obama. As Perazzo mentions, Young was associated with the New America Movement (NAM), which eventually merged with the DSA. A NAM founder and its national political secretary was Marilyn Katz. As I exposed in my original article “Valerie Jarrett: The Next Van Jones” in September, Katz was closely associated with Chicago city hall and helped Obama’s alter ego and intimate adviser Valerie Jarrett get her start as a slumlord at Habitat.

And Katz, a lifelong socialist revolutionary who said last August that she “probably” rejects violence, is a close friend of Jarrett — and of Barack and Michelle Obama. She even visited the White House this July.

Michelle Obama biographer Liza Mundy quotes Katz as saying the moment Jarrett introduced Michelle Obama to her friends, Michelle “was recognized as brilliant and beautiful, and immediately accepted into a very sophisticated social circle.” Mundy writes Michelle “and Barack…enjoyed a range of relations with people who shared their lifestyle, as well as their progressive views and political involvement. ‘These are folks,’ says Marilyn Katz, a member of their social circle, ‘who talk to their friends a number of times a day.” Katz repaid her friend by becoming a campaign bundler for Obama ’08.

Despite the controversy, in late July Katz joined Valerie Jarrett and Susan Sher in Washington for the Obama administration’s celebration of the 37th anniversary of Title IX.

Given her radical history (beginning with SDS during the Days of Rage) and close association with our president and first lady, it may be that Katz helped introduce or reinforce Young’s arguments to the Obamas. They could have been sold socialist ideology by any number of their friends, acquaintances, and contacts. The relationship of Katz, Jarrett, Ayers, the Obamas, Young, Carl Davidson, the New Party, the late Rabbi Arnold Wolf, and many others are as hazy as they are disconcerting. It seems a constellation of Marxists hovers over the first couple at all times — and this is not by chance.

By all accounts, the Obamas are close with their friends — including Katz. The nation is at peril when the White House has an unrepentant ’60s radical on speed dial.